So this weeks post was a little later in coming out as I
have had my fair share of busy-ness but it is a topic that has been on my mind
as long as this blog has. Please feel free to comment and add your own ideas!
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| preschoolers.about.com |
I must say that growing up I was a very girly-girl and
although I was intrigued by all things “Under the sea” I only ever gave thought
to pirates after the appearance of the oh-so-swaggering Captain Jack Sparrow.
The Pirates of the Caribbean series seemed to spark a renewed interest in this
age-old theme. Until then pirates had a bit of a bad rap and in some cases
still do (deservedly- thanks Somalia!). Their value in a therapy session,
though, is incalculable. To the 4-8 year old population this topic holds a
mystical sense of adventure that I take full advantage of. I’m not alone in
this. There are many resources and blogs out there that are also capitalising
on this franchise. One of my favourite bloggers, Brea, from ‘Let’s talk SLP’ has
come up with a whole pirate package. This is full of fun and useful therapy
material that focuses on articulation and language skills. I have acquired some
of these and have frustrated my poor husband by spending my evenings cutting, laminating
and re-cutting these gorgeous pictures. My favourite one is the pirate barrier
game. It is a great way to elicit language and to introduce the rest of the
series.
In my own toy cupboard I have a treasured game: “Pop-up
Pirate-Treasure Island”. This is one in a series of Pop-up Pirate games by TOMY®. I am still trying to get hold of the original Pop-up Pirate here in SA but
it seems impossible. A former colleague had this version and the kids went mad
over it! I had one little boy in particular who was so enthralled by this game
that his mom and I both went on a treasure hunt looking for it for him. I
eventually found a very cheap Chinese knock-off that did the trick.
Now there is actually value in my ramblings. The original
Pop-up pirate was not only useful for keeping attention and making therapy fun
but I would often use it in auditory processing tasks. The game includes swords in 4 different colours;
the point of the game is to put the swords into a barrel, when you hit the
right spot the pirate pops out. It does well in creating suspense and lots of
giggles. I would place the swords on my minimal pairs picture when targeting auditory discrimination. The child would be required to pick the sword from the
picture he heard. I would also use them in auditory sequencing tasks. For
example I would lay out one sword of each colour and then give an instruction
like: “take the red one first and then the yellow one” or “take the blue one,
then the green one and then the red one”. It was then simple to work out what
level we would be working on for auditory memory and sequencing. These tasks would not form the whole therapy
session but form a productive part in the positive reinforcement section of my
session.
The Pop-Up Pirate- Treasure Island game is fairly new in my
repertoire so I have not yet had the fun of figuring out all its hidden
secrets. It can definitely be used for more advanced auditory sequencing tasks
as it contains 6 different coloured keys. This week I also had the opportunity
to use it with a little articulation guy. He has particular difficulty with the
/k/ and /g/ sound as he fronts these to /t/ and /d/ respectively. His attention
is very poor so he finds it hard (and boring) to do traditional drills. This
game gave us the perfect platform to do lots of repetitions of the target words
/key/; /gold/; /coin/; /back/ and /lucky/ as he has had lots of practice with
both /k/ and /g/ in all word positions already. I could’ve taken it even
further by hiding his other target words under the barrels where the keys get
hidden. In fact that is exactly what I’m going to do in our next session. The
exciting bit about this game is that you never know when the sneaky pirate is
going to pop out of the treasure chest and demand his gold back. I foresee
myself using this game for many different language targets (prepositions are
easy to elicit with this) and sentence expansion. I have seen that TOMY® have also come up with
a Captain Jack Sparrow Pop-Up Pirate. That may be another acquisition I’ll have
to make!
Until next week then! Oh and if you want some more ideas for auditory processing tasks then look at these links:
1. https://pinterest.com/schoolsparks/auditory-processing-activities-for-kids/
2. http://www.speakingofspeech.com/Auditory_Processing.html
3. http://sensoryplanet.com/blog.php?user=BodyLogique&blogentry_id=492
1. https://pinterest.com/schoolsparks/auditory-processing-activities-for-kids/
2. http://www.speakingofspeech.com/Auditory_Processing.html
3. http://sensoryplanet.com/blog.php?user=BodyLogique&blogentry_id=492
